This undated handout photo provided by Del Mar College, Texas, shows Adam Alsahli’s image for his student identification card. Alsahli, 20, is the suspect killed in an attack at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas

The suspect who was shot dead as he carried out Thursday’s ‘terrorism-related’ attack on a Texas naval air base has been identified by the FBI as a 20-year-old Syrian-born college student.

According to investigators, Adam Salim Alsahli opened fire at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in an attack that wounded one sailor, a member of the base security force, but no one other than the assailant was killed.

A group that monitors online activity of jihadists has since claimed that Alsahli voiced support for hardline Islamic clerics on social media prior to the thwarted attack.

(Reuters) – A shooting at a U.S. Navy base in Corpus Christi, Texas, that wounded a sailor on Thursday was “terrorism related,” an FBI spokeswoman said, adding that the gunman was dead at the scene but investigators were searching for a potential second suspect.

The shooter, who was not identified by law enforcement, opened fire at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi around 6:15 a.m. CDT (1115 GMT), the Navy Office of Information said in a written statement.

“We have determined that the incident this morning at the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi is terrorism related,” FBI agent Leah Greaves said. “We are working diligently with our state, local and federal partners on this investigation, which is fluid and evolving.”

Greaves said the gunman had been slain at the scene of the shooting, which was still being processed by authorities. A lockdown of the base had been lifted.

“We may have a potential second related person of interest at large in the community, but would encourage the public to remain calm. If you see something, say something,” she said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI cracked the iPhone encryption of the Royal Saudi Air Force trainee who killed three American sailors in a December attack at a U.S. naval base in Florida and found evidence linking him to al Qaeda, Attorney General William Barr said on Monday.

The shooter, Second Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, 21, was killed by law enforcement during the Dec. 6, 2019 attack.

He was on the base as part of a U.S. Navy training program designed to foster links with foreign allies.

The Justice Department succeeded in unlocking the encryption on the shooter’s iPhone after Apple Inc <AAPL.O> declined to do so, Barr told reporters on a conference call.

Muhammad Masood of Minnesota was indicted by a federal grand jury in Minneapolis on Monday of attempting to provide material support to the terrorist faction ISIS, according to a statement Friday from the Department of Justice.

Masood, who is licensed to practice medicine in Pakistan, had been working as a research coordinator at a medical clinic in Rochester, Minnesota under a temporary visa.

In the complaint against Masood, he was accused of wanting to carry out “lone wolf” terrorist actions against the U.S. and travel to Syria to join ISIS. He also allegedly claimed his allegiance to the terrorist organization.

NEW YORK: A Pakistani-American woman — Zoobia Shahnaz — has been sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment by a United States’ Federal Court for providing material support to terror fronts of Islamic States in Pakistan, China and Turkey.

The verdict was pronounced by District Judge Joanna Seybert on Wednesday. Zoobia Shahnaz had pleaded guilty in November 2018 for providing material support to a foreign terrorist organisation, specifically more than USD 150,000 to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS.

“As set forth in court filings and facts presented at the sentencing hearing, between March 2017 and July 2017, Shahnaz defrauded numerous financial institutions to obtain money for the ISIS, including a loan for approximately USD 22,500,” reads a statement by US Department of Justice.

“Shahnaz also fraudulently obtained more than a dozen credit cards and used them to purchase approximately USD 62,000 in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies online. Shahnaz then made multiple wire transfers totaling more than USD 150,000 to individuals and entities in Pakistan, China and Turkey that were fronts for ISIS,” added the statement.

On July 31, 2017, Shahnaz was arrested at John F Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York, while attempting to board a flight with a layover in Istanbul, Turkey — a common point of entry for individuals travelling from western countries to join ISIS in Syria.

This will teach those Islamophobes that Islam is a religion of peace: a professor is facing death threats for suggesting otherwise. Nicholas Damask, Ph.D., has taught political science at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona for 24 years. But now he is facing a barrage of threats, and his family, including his 9-year-old grandson and 85-year-old parents, is in hiding, while College officials are demanding that he apologize – all for the crime of speaking the truth about the motivating ideology behind the threat of Islamic jihad worldwide.

Damask, who has an MA in International Relations from American University in Washington, D.C., and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Cincinnati, says he is “to my knowledge, the only tenured political science faculty currently teaching in Arizona to write a doctoral dissertation on terrorism.” He has taught Scottsdale Community College’s World Politics for each of the 24 years he has worked at the school.

Professor Damask’s troubles began during the current Spring semester, when a student took exception to three quiz questions. The questions were:

Who do terrorists strive to emulate? A. Mohammed

Where is terrorism encouraged in Islamic doctrine and law? A. The Medina verses [i.e., the portion of the Qur’an traditionally understood as having been revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career]

Terrorism is _______ in Islam. A. justified within the context of jihad.

Damask explained: “All quiz questions on each of my quizzes, including the ones in question here, are carefully sourced to the reading material. On this quiz, questions were sourced to the Qur’an, the hadiths, and the sira (biography) of Mohammed, and other reputable source material.” And indeed, the three questions reflect basic facts that are readily established by reference to Islamic texts and teachings and numerous statements of terrorists themselves.

Despite this, the student emailed Damask to complain that he was “offended” by these questions, as they were “in distaste of Islam.” Damask recounted: “Until this point, notably, the student had expressed no reservations about the course material and indeed he said he enjoyed the course.”

Damask sent two lengthy emails to the student responding to his complaints, but to no avail. A social media campaign began against Damask on the College’s Instagram account. Damask notes: “An unrelated school post about a school contest was hijacked, with supporters of the student posting angry, threatening, inflammatory and derogatory messages about the quiz, the school, and myself.”

At this point, College officials should have defended Professor Damask and the principle of free inquiry, but that would require a sane academic environment. Scottsdale Community College officials, Damask said, “stepped in to assert on a new Instagram post that the student was correct and that I was wrong – with no due process and actually no complaint even being filed – and that he would receive full credit for all the quiz questions related to Islam and terrorism.”

On May 1, Damask had a conference call with Kathleen Iudicello, Scottsdale Community College’s Dean of Instruction, and Eric Sells, the College’s Public Relations Marketing Manager. Damask recalls: “I was not offered to write any part of the school’s response, and there was no discussion of academic freedom or whether the College was even supportive of me to teach about Islamic terrorism. The very first point I made with them on the call (and virtually the only input I had) is that I insisted that the College’s release was to have no mention of any actions to be required to be taken by me personally, I was very clear about that.”

Predictably, Iudicello and Sells ignored that. They issued an apology to the student and to the “Islamic community,” and stated on the College’s Instagram page that Damask would be “required” to apologize to the student for the quiz questions, as the questions were “inappropriate” and “inaccurate,” and would be permanently removed from Damask’s exams.

Damask also had three phone calls with Iudicello, who gave him a bracing introduction into today’s academic funhouse world, where if someone is offended by the truth, it’s the truth that has to be deep-sixed. “During one call with Iudicello,” Damask recounts, “she stated that my quiz questions were ‘Islamophobic,’ that before continuing to have any further class content on Islamic terrorism I would likely need to meet with an Islamic religious leader to go over the content, and that I would likely need to take a class (perhaps at Arizona State) taught by a Muslim before teaching about Islamic terrorism.”

“The irony here,” says Damask, “is that literally during this phone call, I and my wife were tossing socks and jammies and our nine-year-old grandson’s toys into a suitcase to get the hell out of the house because of the death threats made by Islamic commenters on the College’s Instagram page.”

Iran vowed to target any U.S. military vessel that tries to endanger Iranian ships in the Persian Gulf, ramping up new frictions touched off by a hostile encounter at sea last week.

“If any vessel or any military unit of the terrorist forces of America seek to put the security of any of our military or non-military vessels in danger, that unit or vessel will be targeted,” Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander General Hossein Salami warned on Thursday. His comments to state TV were published by the corps’ official news website, Sepah News.

Salami issued his threat a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said he’d ordered the U.S. Navy to destroy any Iranian gunboats that harass American ships. A week earlier, the Pentagon accused Iran of “dangerously” doing just that, but Salami reiterated Iran’s claim that American vessels approached its ships in an “unprofessional” manner.

Tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalated dramatically after Trump abandoned the multipower nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic. Actions by both sides, at times in the Gulf, have brought them to the brink of military confrontation on multiple occasions, most recently with the U.S. assassination of Iran’s top general Qassem Soleimani on Jan. 3.

Six U.S. military vessels were conducting training operations in international waters last week when 11 Iranian ships “crossed the bows and sterns of the U.S. vessels at extremely close range and high speeds,” according to the April 15 U.S. Navy statement.

At one point, the Iranian ships came within 10 yards of the Coast Guard cutter Maui’s bow.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) — The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is investigating a stabbing and an officer involved shooting incident after Knoxville gas station employees and a suspect were killed Tuesday morning.

Three Pilot employees are dead and one customer injured after a stabbing and an officer-involved shooting at an East Knox County Pilot truck stop.

According to the TBI, the Knox County Sheriff’s Office received a report of the incident at the Strawberry Plains Pike location around 7 am on Tuesday. Upon arrival officers observed at least one person with stab wounds and a man identified by witnesses as the suspect armed with a knife in the Pilot parking lot.

According to officials, officers confronted the suspect and when he refused to drop the weapon, one of the officers fired shots, striking the man. …

Four female victims were stabbed, the three employees were pronounced dead at the scene and the fourth who was a customer was transported to a local hospital. The status of her condition is unknown.

Pilot CEO Jimmy Haslam released a statement regarding the incident.

Today is a difficult day for the Pilot Company family. We are devastated to confirm the loss of three team members and the injury of a guest after an act of violence at our Strawberry Plains, Tennessee, location this morning. It is with heavy hearts that we extend our deepest sympathy to the families and loved ones of the victims. We are providing support and counseling to the families and our team. We are working closely with local authorities. Please keep these families in your thoughts and prayers.”

STUTTGART, Germany — A senior al-Shabab leader who played a key role in plotting deadly attacks throughout East Africa has been killed in an airstrike in Somalia, U.S. Africa Command said Tuesday.

Yusuf Jiis was one of three al-Shabab members killed in the April 2 airstrike, AFRICOM said. The strike was one of a flurry of attacks in Somalia in recent days.

Jiis was “violent, ruthless, and responsible for the loss of many innocent lives,” AFRICOM commander Gen. Stephen Townsend said in a statement. “His removal makes Somalia and neighboring countries safer.”

AFRICOM has launched six airstrikes in Somalia since April 2, including one on Monday in which five terrorists were killed, it said.

AFRICOM said no civilians were killed in Monday’s strike on Jilib, around 230 miles south of the capital, Mogadishu, but it is investigating reports that allege there were civilian casualties.

“As with any allegation of civilian casualties U.S. Africa Command receives and reviews any information it has about the incident, including any relevant information provided by third parties,” it said.

AFRICOM announced last week that it will begin issuing quarterly reports on the outcomes of its investigations into civilian casualty claims as a way to boost transparency.

The body of Yunis, who closely collaborated with Hezbollah’s ally Iran, was discovered over the weekend inside a car where he had been shot and stabbed, according toHaaretz. Hezbollah announced that he was killed on Saturday.

Hezbollah has not accused Israel or any other state entity of killing Yunis, although the commander was reportedly tasked with tracking potential Israeli or foreign agents. Lebanese security sources indicate that a suspect has been arrested, although further details are not yet clear.

Yunis was reportedly a “close associate” of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, who was killed by the United States in a targeted airstrike in Baghdad in January.

“The information provided by Hezbollah suggests that the assassination of Younis was carried out by the Israeli Mossad and its agents,” Janoubia, a Lebanese news website, reported, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Hezbollah is closely affiliated with Iran, which has supplied it with funding and with weapons. The group, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and other countries, has carried out rocket attacks against Israel.

The Isis terrorist group is steering clear of Europe because of the coronavirus. Having previously urged its supporters to attack European cities, the group is now advising members to “stay away from the land of the epidemic” in case they become infected.

The group has issued a new set of “sharia directives” that instruct followers to “cover their mouths when yawning and sneezing” and to wash their hands regularly. Isis militants have plenty of experience in covering their faces, though previously they did so to hide their identities when beheading hostages on camera.

In the latest issue of its al-Naba newsletter, the group refers not to guidance from the World Health Organisation or other medical experts, but to recorded quotes by the Prophet Muhammad, known to Muslims as hadiths.

The newsletter refers to a “plague” described as a “torment sent by God on whomsoever He wills”. Another message notes: “Illnesses do not strike by themselves but by the command and decree of God.”

Isis has lost almost all its so-called caliphate in the Middle East after a string of defeats , but its fragmented remains are still active in Iraq and Syria.

The newsletter warned that the “healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the afflicted should not exit from it”.

But it may not be safe in the Middle East either — Iraq has already reported 101 cases of the coronavirus and 10 deaths.

BAGHDAD/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Three American troops and several Iraqi forces were wounded on Saturday in the second major rocket attack in the past week on an Iraqi base north of Baghdad, U.S. and Iraqi officials said, raising the stakes in an escalating cycle of attacks and reprisals.

Iraq’s Joint Operations Command said 33 Katyusha rockets were launched near a section of the Taji base which houses U.S.-led coalition troops. It said the military found seven rocket launchers and 24 unused rockets in the nearby Abu Izam area.

The Iraqi military said several Iraqi air defense servicemen were critically wounded. Two of the three wounded U.S. troops are seriously injured and are being treated at a military hospital in Baghdad, the Pentagon said.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman declined to speculate on potential U.S. responses but, in a statement, cited Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s warning last week: “You cannot attack and wound American Service Members and get away with it, we will hold them to account.”

The rocket attacks came less than two days after the United States launched retaliatory air strikes at facilities in Iraq that the Pentagon linked to the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah militia, which it blamed for Wednesday’s attack on Taji…..

A Brentwood woman was sentenced Friday to 13 years in federal prison after pleading guilty to a charge of providing more than $150,000 in financial support to the ISIS terrorist organization.

Zoobia Shahnaz, 29, was in addition sentenced to 10 years of supervised release by U.S. District Judge Joanna Seybert in Central Islip.

Shahnaz, a U.S. citizen born in Pakistan and a lab technician at a Manhattan hospital, obtained more than $85,000 of the money through a number of fraud schemes and passed the funds on to ISIS in a further complex manner, according to officials.

Never underestimate the ability of the U.S. military to pick the time, place and target of their own choosing when they go for ‘payback’.

The U.S. military conducted airstrikes in Iraq on Thursday in retaliation for a recent rocket attack that killed two American service members and one British service member and wounded 14 others, according to two U.S. officials, one of whom characterized the strikes as defensive in nature.

It was unclear what targets were being struck by U.S. military aircraft, but earlier in the day, senior Pentagon officials had blamed Iranian-backed Shia militia groups for Wednesday’s attack on Camp Taji in Iraq.

“Yesterday’s attack by Iranian-backed Shia militia groups consisted of multiple indirect fires that originated form a stationary platform and was clearly targeting coalition and partner forces on Camp Taji,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper told reporters on Thursday. “But let me be clear, the United States will not tolerate attacks against our people our interests or our allies.”

Esper continued, “All options are on the table as we work with our partners to bring the perpetrators to justice and maintain deterrence.”

An Islamic scholar who said the coronavirus was “Allah’s punishment” for China’s treatment of Muslims now has coronavirus.

How ironic.

Back in February, Hadi Al-Modarresi, who is based in Iran, said that the coronavirus outbreak was “undoubtedly an act of Allah that is divine punishment against the Chinese for their treatment, mockery, and disrespect towards Muslims and Islam,” reported MEMRI-TV.

“It is obvious that the spread of this virus is an act of Allah. How do we know this? The spread of the coronavirus began in China, an ancient and vast country, the population of which makes up one seventh of humanity,” said Al-Modarresi.

“More than a billion people live in that country. The authorities in that country are tyrannical and they laid siege to more than a million Muslims and placed them under house arrest. The journalists in that country began to mock the niqab of Muslim women and they forced Muslim men to eat pork and drink wine. Allah sent a disease upon them and this disease laid siege to 40 million [Chinese people]. The same niqab that they mocked has been forced upon them, both men and women, by Allah, by means of the state authorities and officials,” he added.

It is now being reported that Al-Modarresi has contracted coronavirus, meaning that Allah must obviously be punishing him for wrongdoing.

The anti-semitism isn’t surprising, but the open display is. Such confidence indicates an arrogance often seen in thick headed radicals but not politicians who normally don’t want to do anything that might negatively influence a voter.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) was recently pictured sporting a t-shirt that portrays the modern state of Israel as belonging entirely to Palestine.

Tlaib, one of Congress’s leading critics of Israel, was pictured in the t-shirt while promoting a recently published book by Linda Sarsour, another outspoken critic of the Jewish state who serves as a surrogate for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.

The shirt portrays present-day Israel as a Palestinian state. Shirts of this nature have been a mainstay of pro-Palestinian activists who reject a two-state solution and argue that the world’s only Jewish state should not exist.

“Stand in solidarity with Palestine by wearing this beautiful Palestinian tee-shirt,” reads one online advertisement for the shirt worn by Tlaib. “An outlined map of Palestine is filled with red, white, and green Arabic letters that look stunning from a distance and spell the word Palestine up close. A patterned shemagh wraps around the neck of the Palestinian state like the brave soldiers whose boots stand on the dusty ground.”

Tlaib did not respond to a request for comment.

Tlaib has been repeatedly criticized by the pro-Israel and Jewish communities for comments they say are anti-Semitic. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which combats anti-Semitic incitement, condemned Tlaib in late January for tweeting an inaccurate story claiming Israeli Jews murdered a Palestinian child. The ADL cited her for promoting a “blood libel” that was “steeped in centuries-old accusations used to demonize Jews.”

Tlaib’s associations with many organizations and causes that single Israel out for undue criticism have also generated deep divides between the congresswoman and the pro-Israel community. They include groups that support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which critics call anti-Semitic for its promotion of economic boycotts against Jewish-owned businesses.

Former Iranian ambassador to Syria and a hostage-taker of U.S. diplomats, Hossein Sheikholeslam, died Thursday from a Covid19 infection, local news outlets report.

An advisor to the Islamic Republic Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, 68-year-old Sheikholeslam was one of the leaders of the so-called “Muslim Student Followers of Imam’s Line,” who took 52 U.S. diplomats hostage, on November 4, 1979, and released them after 444 days.

Sheikholeslam studied at the University of California at Berkeley before the Iranian revolution and later interrogated U.S. Embassy staff members during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979.

Tested positive for the novel coronavirus two days ago, Sheikholeslam was taken to Masih Daneshvari hospital in Tehran, where all Iranian authorities infected with Covid-19 are treated.

Sheikholeslam’s death was announced a day after the advisor to the speaker of parliament, Hossein Abdollahian, had insisted that he was recovering.